Anyone know of a good comparison of all of various virtual tabletops out there that can be used to play Savage Worlds with?_________________-Kerry Harrison
Organizer, Space City Savages
Running: 50 Fathoms
Prepping: several different scenarios
Playing: New Year's War Playtest

In my experience teh two best ones to play SW with are Fantasy Ground II and Maptool. Maptool is free but has a higher learning curve, and FGII is prettier but is not free (every player has to pay for a license, or the GM has to shell for an ultimate license and all his players then play for tree). A SW ruleset exists for each VTT (same thing, FGII's not free), and they both work great in my experience.[/url]

My experience wasn't great with Forge, but that was a few months ago and I'm sure they kept improving it.

Another good one I forgot to mention was roll20. It's still fairly new, but is very very promising (very stable in my experience, and it's got card decks). For Forge and Roll20 are system-agnostic, so there won't be a SW ruleset to automate things like in FGII or Maptool, but they are valid options nevertheless.

Fantasy Grounds 2 has great support for Savage Worlds and their settings.

Downside is the start up cost is significant. You ether need an Ultimate License (for the GM, players can then play with the trial version) or the GM needs a Full License and all the players need a Lite License to play.

The upside is that it doesn't take you months of XML coding to enter the Savage world's core information / setting info (for the ones availible) yourself.

If I may comment, this table listed as a "Work In Progress" but for as long as it has been "in progress" is woefully incomplete. In particular Fantasy Grounds, iTabletop, and MapTool (I own them all) have many of their features missing screen shots._________________Al B.
Mr. Sulu, ahead Warp Factor 5. Course: Third star on the right, straight on till morning.

I haven't ever used Fantasy Grounds, but from what I've been able to discern from the website there isn't a map editor/creation tools, which would be a killer for me. The cost would also be a deterrent for me as well, as I don't run games online nearly enough to justify spending $150 on any VTT and then extra $ for the specific SW setting templates.

I use MapTool and I'm quite happy with it. I'll echo that there's a learning curve to overcome with it and it has a few kludges/rough edges. Actually, I'm not so sure if it's the tool itself or the Savage Worlds framework that are are the source of those rough spots. All can be worked around with some perseverance, just expect to have an hour or 2 of frustration when you're new to it.

The best thing about MapTool is that it has some nice map creation tools and I've actually used its screenshot saving feature to make maps for printing and tabletop play. Unfortunately it only outputs in 72 dpi, but it works well enough for a quick map. There's also a heap of tiles, objects and textures available for it that you can find links to in the the rptools.net forums.

I'd be more inclined to pay for Roll20 if they had a one time licence fee instead of yearly. Still, it is an excellent platform and not even bad for Play by Post if you're like me and work an irregular schedule which hinders regular games.

I do have a GM licence for d20Pro and the Lifetime Master of the Universe licence for iTabletop. Though I really need to learn to use them better. Apparently someone made a tool to integrate Google Maps into d20Pro so I need to check that out, and I'm not overly impressed with iTabletop at the moment, but invested in a recent Indigogo (where I got my licence for much less than the regular cost) and have hopes the platform will improve. In both cases, I would love to see Google+ Hangouts integration like Roll20 is using.

If I may comment, this table listed as a "Work In Progress" but for as long as it has been "in progress" is woefully incomplete. In particular Fantasy Grounds, iTabletop, and MapTool (I own them all) have many of their features missing screen shots.

I noticed that the chart doesn't point out that FG2 has a combat turn tracking system. If you buy the Savage Worlds ruleset, it even uses playing cards, incorporates Level headed & improved level headed.

The SW ruleset for FG2 also provides in game documentation for all the skills (one click rolling for skill checks), edges and hindrances (can be dragged and dropped on you character sheet). Alot of SW settings have the documents availble for perchase.

Bennies (and fate chips for Deadlands setting) are supported in game. There's a chase window to help with chases.

You don't appreciate shareable in game documentation that you can buy, until you try to enter a whole RPG book's worth of text into a VT software. And drag and drop addition to character sheets saves hours of typing.

I just ran my first game with Roll20 and it worked very well. The system is easy to pick up, and pretty intuitive. (I have played around with map tools in the past, but never run a game using it.)

My group had one session to create characters, and just push tokens around a tavern map to learn the ins and outs of Roll20, and by the end everyone seemed to get it. Before we played, I put wild die macros on the toolbar, and most of e players put important character attributes and skills in a journal entry, (and some put roll macros there as well.) I also esed token tool for some of my monsters and npcs.

Overall the adventure went very smoothly, and the vtt never really seemed to intrude on the game experience. For o zero cost, no learning curve option, Roll20 hit our sweet spot.

Has anyone yet built a VT that's optimized for iOS or Android tablets? Seems like such a natural ... . Anything that runs in-browser should work, but that's not always the case, especially if Flash is involved.

Steve_________________"When choosing between two evils, I always pick the one I haven't tried before." -- Mae West